SEOTool Review

Clearly, as the name suggests, SEOTool is a tool that is designed to help you make your website better for SEO. But how does it do this? Well, by scanning your website and telling you everything that’s wrong with it. You might be thinking, “that sounds wonderful!”, but there is a catch or two, mainly the unpublished price. Is it worth it? With so few SEOTool reviews out there, it can be hard to tell, but it’s time to find out.

What Does It Do?

It does what many SEO consultants would do. It looks through a website, page by page, and produces a list of problems that could be fixed to make the site more optimized, some of them more serious than others. It includes a baked-in concept of best practices for SEO. Basically, it takes a lot of the work out of being an SEO consultant.

What exactly does it do, though? Well, it crawls through a website, starting at the home page, and follows from one link to the next to discover more internal pages. It then starts measuring things. Does the page have a title tag? How long is that title tag? Is it too long? Is it too short? What about the description tag? Are there any odd internal redirects? Any other problems? These are all questions that SEOTool answers automatically.

You may be wondering what exactly it checks for. Here is a nearly comprehensive list:

Heading rules broken (more than one H1 tag or heading tags out of order)

Conflicting or invalid meta-robots

Pages with relative links

Homepage backlinks missing the trailing slash

Missing anchor titles

Image only backlinks

Duplicate content

Non-unique titles, descriptions, keyword tags, or H1 tags

Matching title and description tag

Titles or descriptions too short or too long

No visible text

Empty H1, title, description, keywords, or robots tags

Bold tags overused

Text links too long

Too many links in not enough content

Excessive external to internal link ratio

Low word count

Excessive page linking

No text links

Internal page visibility (most visible pages to least visible pages)

Links to subdomains

External links

Nofollowed links

Internal, subdomain, or external redirects

That’s probably a lot to digest, and it probably makes you wonder how long it would take you to dig up all this information for an entire website yourself. And then chart it out, creating sitewide linking patterns that could spell trouble for SEO. Days? Weeks? Longer? Well, SEOTool is banking on it taking you a very long time, making this tool worth a lot to you.

Pricing

You’ll find that pricing is not displayed anywhere on the website, and that’s for a few reasons. First off, you would have a clear sticker shock experience and probably wouldn’t look at what the tool is capable of. Second, is that the price of the tool can vary significantly depending on, largely, how many times you’d like to run the tool. That’s right, you don’t buy the tool, you buy individual runnings of the tool.

Well, what is the range of cost? It can vary from a few hundred per run if you run them very often to nearly $2000 per run if you run them rarely. Yes, it is very expensive. It can save you a lot of time, and only you can decide if it is really worth it. Many people find that it is, many people find that it isn’t.

Limitations

This might be the make it or break it point for a lot of people considering this tool. The first limitation is highly related to the price. You can’t just run the tool when you want to, you have to schedule it and pay for it each time. This means that every time you think you might want to run the tool, you’ll have to deliberate over whether or not it’s worth it.

The other big limitation is the number of pages the tool can handle. Supposedly, the staff at SEOTool is working to reduce this limitation, but right now, the tool can only scan up to 5,000 pages. If that isn’t bad enough, there have been issues in the past with the tool failing to run for 5,000 pages, stopping at closer to 1,000.

Extra Benefits for Agencies

If the limitations hurt, but you work at an agency, or you are an individual with SEO clients, this might help bring you back. Specialized reports can be generated using your branding and your wording for every part of what SEOTool finds. Custom branding and wording, as well as custom adjustments of what is “too much” or “too little” for many of the metrics. This customization can be worth a lot to anyone who has a need to put the best foot forward on an old client, a new client, or even a prospective client.

Additionally, the running of the tool gives the website an overall score. By fixing the problems it identifies, you can raise the score, giving you a very valuable measurable improvement that can be presented to the client to help show the worth of your program. The cost, however, is still too high for most individuals to afford, making this benefit more for the agencies.

Overall

With a great set of features, it’s hard not to try out SEOTool, if you can afford the cost. The custom branding is also incredibly useful, if you can get around the somewhere between 1000 and 5000 page limitation. At this price, it is hard to recommend to individuals, but agencies and organizations might have a lot to gain from it.

1 comment

The biggest criticisms that I have with SEOTool are these two that Steve brought up:

1. The pricing – having to buy large volume to avoid paying $2k per run fee pretty much makes this an agency-only tool and likely a dominant part of the analytical offering.

2. The limitation on the number of pages crawled makes no sense at all. You would expect a super detailed premium tool like this to look at all of the data or at least a larger chunk of out pages that allows the unimportant ones to be filtered out.